Thanks for that totally intriguing postcard on US cultural history,
Peter. Please continue to use such allusions, provided you elaborate in
footnotes.

An Ignoble Award should be given to whoever it was that worked out that
the most effective rhetoric for justifying inequality is to abuse those
(educated) social strata who try to mitigate the position of the poor. A
brilliant move. In Australia it is latte coffee and chardonnay wine that
are the symbols of privilege.

Had you heard that Gina Rheinhart, who inherited a vast fortune in W.
Australian mining (thanks to mining licences from a friendly government)
is now the richest woman in the world. Last year she actually joined a
street demonstration carrying a placard opposing higher taxes. She is
currently trying to buy control of the Fairfax newspapers, and in court
trying to block her own children from receiving their share of her
father's inheritance, and has persuaded the government to allow her to
import workers prepared to work under the hellish conditions she
provides in her mines. She would not be out of place in a dickensian
fish market. The desparately poor and the disgustingly rich have a
shared fervent desire for a bigger slice of the pie.

Andy
Peter Smagorinsky wrote:

My apologies for my US-centric references. The Underground Railroad was the escape route for slaves prior to the US Civil War, and they used coded texts to provide directions. "Follow the drinking gourd" was a spiritual that was coded to indicate that when traveling at night, slaves should follow the Little Dipper constellation to make sure they were always headed toward the North Star, which is in the constellation. There was a whole range of symbols embedded in quilts and other homely objects designed to indicate the escape routes and hiding places. The "n-word" is the polite term for "nigger" which has historically served as a hateful term used by Whites on Blacks, more recently appropriated by Blacks for their own usage.
My chippy (in the US, meaning aggressive and easily irritated) response concerned Jay's dismissal of his opponents as "elites," which in the US has served as the Conservative term to dismiss academics or anyone else with an informed position that they don't like. It tends to be anti-intellectual in usage, which I regret to say is characteristic of much public opinion in my beloved land. "Elites" are to be distrusted because of their social engineering, their drinking of wine instead of beer, and eating of arugula instead of regular old lettuce, etc. So any time an academic gives an opinion, it's dismissed as "elitist" and Joe the Plumber is consulted for what Real Americans think. And so Barak Obama, who grew up in a single-parent home with little money, was painted as an "elitist" because he taught at a private law school before entering politics full-time; meanwhile, his immensely wealthy opponent (McCain) and dimwit running mate (Palin) were somehow cast as "Real Americans" who could be trusted, unlike the elitist academic, Obama.
So, I was quite surprised to see Jay use "elitist" in the same pejorative way to describe policymakers whose beliefs he opposes, since it's the same means by which Jay, you, and I are dismissed by the political Right in the US. It's just a tactic I don't like because it creates a straw person that's easy to blow away because it's based on caricature and overgeneralization. p
-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of Andy Blunden
Sent: Sunday, May 27, 2012 11:48 AM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: Re: [xmca] Fwd: The Privilege of Absurdity
Peter, your interesting email is so full of (what are to me) esoteric allusions that I can hardly grasp your meaning.
But would you agree that in this discussion there seems to be an unwarranted presumption that equality is a universal norm? Granted that the "moral equality" of all human beings is rightfully a universal norm, but we take for granted all kinds of situational inequality. If I buy something in a shop I don't claim equality in determining the price of the goods. In the hospital ED I don't claim equality with the triarge nurse in determining priorities. And we accept that a mother has the right and duty to control the behaviour of their child and not vice versa, etc.
Andy
Peter Smagorinsky wrote:

Are "elites" (whatever they are) the only ones who manipulate symbols? Consider the underground railroad, in which a whole system of symbolic subterfuge was developed to provide roadmaps to the North (e.g., the song, Follow the Drinking Gourd). Or the current appropriation of "the n-word" to take on a whole new set of meanings.

This is a very interesting question, and I hope others will chime in.
In the current political climate in the U.S. of manufactured science, spin doctors, and attack ads, it's very hard not to side with Jay that symbols and ideologies are being deliberately manipulated by elites in ways that directly serve their economic interests. Even though these operatives no doubt rationalize their actions in terms of "the greater good," it seems very difficult to argue that these elites are not deliberately deploying cultural ideas, symbols, and rituals with the intent to manipulate the "dupes."

Where the analysis becomes more difficult to sustain is in the case of "traditional churches and their religions as well as historical and modern ideologies of more secular kinds" which Jay "would emphatically include." First, it is easy to concede that many of these institutions serve the interests of elites. For instance, the Judeo-Christian holy scriptures make frequent reference to eternal obligations of ordinary people to the poor, thereby sanctifying class divisions. And in the Hebrew scriptures, with which I am somewhat better acquainted, there is precise codification of obligations to the Priestly class--definitely self-serving, if one assumes it was exactly that class that wrote/selected the canonical texts. But in the meantime, with the destruction of the Second Temple, there is no longer a Priestly class in Jewish theological practice, so it is not so obvious who the "elites"
perpetrating modern Judaism are, or that their intentions are self-serving.
David
-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu]
On Behalf Of Greg Thompson
Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2012 11:27 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: Re: [xmca] Fwd: The Privilege of Absurdity
Jay,
I, for one, am deeply skeptical of how intentional are the "creations of elites." The elites certainly benefit from these creations, but I think that they are dupes just like the rest of us. The elites just happen to be the "lucky" dupes (depending, of course, on what you mean by "lucky").
My sense is that it's dupes all the way down! (or "up," as the case may be).
-greg
p.s. Seems better to look at the structure of the system for the key to the problem.
On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 11:15 AM, Jay Lemke <jaylemke@umich.edu> wrote:

And not just cultural mediation, but cultural politics. If we strip
away the rhetoric of sacred and moral values, we find, I think, that
all such grand causes for which people fight and die, or just slave
away, are the creations of elites who benefit from the naive trust in
these ideas, symbols, and rituals by large numbers of other people. I
think the usual term for such people is, unfortunately but
accurately,

dupes.

I do not believe that evolution has endowed our species with any
special propensity for being duped by false gods. Our herd comfort in
grand causes and ideals may be real enough, but it is simply the
political manipulation of the underlying human capacity for mediation
by symbols (discourses, images, ideologies, etc.) that gives cover to
the pursuit of their own interests by elites.

The problem is not even so much that all such gods are false. It is
that they are gods made by other people to serve themselves. And I
would emphatically include in this analysis the traditional churches
and their religions as well as historical and modern ideologies of
more secular kinds. It is customary in polite society to simply
tolerate these forms of mass deception for the comfort they give to
those who have little else, but I think we know that this is not the

Humans define the groups to which they belong in abstract terms.
Often

they

strive for lasting intellectual and emotional bonding with anonymous

others, and make their greatest exertions in killing and dying not
to preserve their own lives or to defend their families and friends,

but for the sake of an idea-the transcendent moral conception they
form of themselves, of "who we are." This is the "the privilege of
absurdity; to which no living creature is subject, but man only'" of

which Hobbes wrote in *Leviathan*. In*The Descent of Man*, Darwin
cast it as the virtue of "morality ... the spirit of patriotism,
fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy" with which winning
groups are better endowed in history's spiraling competition for
survival and dominance. Across cultures,

primary

group identity is bounded by sacred values, often in the form of

religious

beliefs or transcendental ideologies, which lead some groups to
triumph over others because of non-rational commitment from at least

some of its members to actions that drive success independent, or
all out of proportion, from expected rational outcomes.

For Darwin himself, moral virtue was most clearly associated not
with intuitions, beliefs, and behaviors about fairness and
reciprocity, emotionally supported by empathy and consolation-which
constitute nearly the entire subject matter of recent work in the
philosophy, psychology,

and

neuroscience of morality-but with a propensity to what we nowadays
call "parochial altruism": especially extreme self-sacrifice in war
and other intense forms of human conflict, where likely prospects
for individual

and

even group survival had very low initial probability. Heroism,
martyrdom, and other forms of self-sacrifice for the group appear to